best way to host a membership site

[Magdoll]

Hi,
I know this is potentially off-topic, but because python is the
language I'm most comfortable with and I've previously had experiences
with plone, I'd as much advice as possible on this.

I want to host a site where people can register to become a user. They
should be able to maintain their own "showroom", where they can show
blog entries (maybe just by linking to their own blogs on some other
blog/album-hosting site like Xanga), put up pictures (again, I'm not
thinking about actually hosting these data, since there are already
plenty of places to put your pictures and blogs). The most important
thing is they will be able to build up a "profile" where I can store
in a DB. The profile will include membership information - for now,
think of it as "member X owns item A,B,C and gave comments on A such
and such, also member X is a male white caucasian between his 20-30
who likes outdoors". Eventually, I want this to be a simple social-
networking site where people can share a very particular hobby (I'm
doing it for comsetics and for a very targeted group that are active
bloggers, so they'll be somewhat web-salient) and the backend can
collect enough data (while maintaining privacy) to build up a
recommendation system similar to Netflix's movie recommendations, or
Match.com if you will.

I want to know that given I know python best and I abhor C#/ASP, what
is the best thing to use. A friend recommended Ruby on Rails - not to
instigate war here, but I'd welcome comments on that (I don't know
Ruby, but I'll learn). I've used PLONE before, but back then I
remembered the site ran incredably slow (or it could just be the
server), and there were issues with upgrades. I want to minimze time
on trying to learn how to write an interface for users to register and
manage their own space. Also I want an infrastructure that's not too
rigid so if in the future I want to add more apps it's not to hard.

I've also heard about django, but not enough to know how far it'll get
me. I'm open to all sorts of suggestions. Thanks!

- Magdoll

 

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Magdoll a écrit :

Hi,
I know this is potentially off-topic, but because python is the
language I'm most comfortable with and I've previously had experiences
with plone, I'd as much advice as possible on this.

I want to host a site where people can register to become a user. They
should be able to maintain their own "showroom", where they can show
blog entries (maybe just by linking to their own blogs on some other
blog/album-hosting site like Xanga), put up pictures (again, I'm not
thinking about actually hosting these data, since there are already
plenty of places to put your pictures and blogs). The most important
thing is they will be able to build up a "profile" where I can store
in a DB. The profile will include membership information - for now,
think of it as "member X owns item A,B,C and gave comments on A such
and such, also member X is a male white caucasian between his 20-30
who likes outdoors". Eventually, I want this to be a simple social-
networking site where people can share a very particular hobby (I'm
doing it for comsetics and for a very targeted group that are active
bloggers, so they'll be somewhat web-salient) and the backend can
collect enough data (while maintaining privacy) to build up a
recommendation system similar to Netflix's movie recommendations, or
Match.com if you will.

You may want to have a look at o'reilly's "Programming Collective
Intelligence"
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/

The code examples are alas very very poorly coded, but at least they are
in Python.

I want to know that given I know python best and I abhor C#/ASP, what
is the best thing to use. A friend recommended Ruby on Rails - not to
instigate war here, but I'd welcome comments on that (I don't know
Ruby, but I'll learn).

Ruby by itself is a nice language, but really on the same "niche" as
Python. Rails is a nice framework too, but there are real problems wrt/
perfs and scalability - nothing that can't be solved given enough
efforts and hardware, but depending on the expected load, this might be
something you want to take into account (or just don't care).

I've used PLONE before, but back then I
remembered the site ran incredably slow (or it could just be the
server), and there were issues with upgrades.

Plone is indeed a 80000-pounds behemoth, and (from working experience)
is certainly one of the worst possible solution for anything else than
pure content management.

I want to minimze time
on trying to learn how to write an interface for users to register and
manage their own space. Also I want an infrastructure that's not too
rigid so if in the future I want to add more apps it's not to hard.

I've also heard about django, but not enough to know how far it'll get
me. I'm open to all sorts of suggestions. Thanks!

We're about to start a couple somewhat similar projects here, and while
our chief engineer is a definitive Ruby/Rails addict, we finally settled
on Django. While it's not my own personal favorite Python MVC framework,
it's still a very good one, and probably the more mature and stable so
far. wrt/ the "add more apps in the future" concern, you may want to
read this:
http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2007/nov/29/django-blog/

HTH

 

[Aaron Watters]

We're about to start a couple somewhat similar projects here, and while
our chief engineer is a definitive Ruby/Rails addict, we finally settled
on Django. While it's not my own personal favorite Python MVC framework,
it's still a very good one, and probably the more mature and stable so
far. wrt/ the "add more apps in the future" concern, you may want to
read this:http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2007/nov/29/django-blog/

Interesting link. Django does seem to be a well designed
modular approach -- and I think if it had existed back in
'97 the history of web development would have been much
different.

I can't help feeling that it would be nice to have a
collection of tools that was even more orthogonal
and flexible, and WSGI
seems to possibly offer a nice base platform for constructing
tools like these. Also I think it remains devilishly difficult
to implement ajaxy functionalities like smart data pickers,
in-form validation, partial form saving, "chatty interfaces" etc.

What are some good paradigms or
methodologies or ideas out there that the Python community
should steal?

warning: It's very possible that my understanding of Django is not
deep enough and that the answer is "Django".
-- Aaron Watters
===
http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/pydistro.py/go?FREETEXT=you+may+cheat

 

[Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven]

Also I want an infrastructure that's not too rigid so if in the future I
want to add more apps it's not to hard.

Not to belittle Django, but for what I wanted to do with it, it was too
restraining.

I instead went with a combination of:

Werkzeug - http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/
SQLAlchemy - http://www.sqlalchemy.org/
Genshi - http://genshi.edgewall.org/ (although some people might prefer
Jinja is they like Django's templating - http://jinja.pocoo.org/)
Babel - http://babel.edgewall.org/

This provided me with a lot of flexibility, more than Django could've
provided me with (but hey, welcome to the general limitation of frameworks).

--
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai
イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン
http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/ | GPG: 2EAC625B
The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our
mastery -- not over nature but of ourselves...

 

[Aaron Watters]

....
Werkzeug -http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/ ....

Wow. An initial glance looks great! I need help with pronunciation,
though .
(also, I'm a little disappointed because I made some notes that looked
a little
like this...)
-- Aaron Watters
===
http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/pydistro.py/go?FREETEXT=slip+nibble

 

[JYA]

Hi

is the best thing to use. A friend recommended Ruby on Rails - not to
instigate war here, but I'd welcome comments on that (I don't know

You should have a look at Pylons then.
It is similar in essence to Ruby on Rails, but using Pythons.

http://pylonshq.com/

 

[Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven]

Wow. An initial glance looks great! I need help with pronunciation,
though .

Werkzeug is supposed to be pronounced in German.
It translates to 'tool'.